EMV is a technical standard for smart payment cards and for payment terminals and automated teller machines which can accept them. EMV cards are smart cards (also called chip cards or IC cards) which store their data on integrated circuits rather than magnetic stripes, although many EMV cards also have stripes for backward compatibility. They can be contact cards which must be physically inserted (or "dipped") into a reader, or contactless cards which can be read over a short distance using radio-frequency identification technology. Payment cards which comply with the EMV standard are often called chip-and-PIN or chip-and-signature cards, depending on the exact authentication methods required to use them.

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three companies which originally created the standard. The standard is now managed by EMVCo, a consortium with control split equally among Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, China UnionPay, and Discover.[1]

There are standards based on ISO/IEC7816 for contact cards, and standards based on ISO/IEC 14443 for contactless cards (PayPass, PayWave, ExpressPay).

The most widely known chip card implementations of EMV standard are:

VIS - Visa

M/Chip - MasterCard

AEIPS - American Express

CUP - China Union Pay

J Smart - JCB

D-PAS - Discover/Diners Club International.

Visa and MasterCard have also developed standards for using EMV cards in devices to support card-not-present transactions over the telephone and Internet. MasterCard has the Chip Authentication Program (CAP) for secure e-commerce. Its implementation is known as EMV-CAP and supports a number of modes. Visa has the Dynamic Passcode Authentication (DPA) scheme, which is their implementation of CAP using different default values.

In February 2010, computer scientists from Cambridge University demonstrated that an implementation of EMV PIN entry is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack; however, the way PINs are processed depends on the capabilities of the card and the terminal.